Added on December 21, 2017 at 22:16 German time: Today, December 21, 2017 a total of 128 countries in the United Nations General Assembly with 193 members backed a non-binding United Nations Resolution calling for the United States to drop its decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. Only 9 countries voted against the resolution, including Israel and the United States as well as Guatemala, Honduras, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Palau, Nauru and Togo. 35 countries abstained, and 21 countries did not cast a vote.
Ahead of the vote, U.S. President Trump had threatened to cut aid to countries in favor of the non-binding resolution.
Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem
Article added on December 21, 2017 at 07:39 German time: The self-proclaimed dealmaker Donald Trump risks to make a pre-existing mess worse. The announcement to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem is just another uninformed decision by President Trump. It is a kind of diplomatic cookie for the Israeli side but offers nothing to the Palestinians.
In May 2017, President Trump made a speech at the Arab Islamic American Summit, which may have given some hope to some people in the region. On December 6, 2017 he made an uninformed and one-sided decision that does not take into account international law, the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people as well as religious beliefs of the Muslim world.
If Donald Trump intended to make a bold move to bring the Palestinians and the Israeli back to the negotiating table, this one-sided announcement was surely not his best option.
As a result, several Palestinian factions announced “three days of rage” across the West Bank. The danger of another “Intifada”, of months of unrest and a substantial rise of the number of terror attacks was real but, so far, has not materialized.
However, it is clear that, in 1947, the United Nations General Assembly decided to put Jerusalem under UN administration. In Resolution 181, the UN had decided to create both a Jewish and an Arab state on Palestinian territory.
Those plans never materialized because, after the Israeli declaration of independence on May 14, 1948 the armies of Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria attacked Israel. The Arabs lost the war and Jerusalem was divided in a Western part under Israeli control and an Eastern part under Jordanian control.
As early as in 1950, Israel declared Jerusalem to be its capital. This move was never recognized by the international community. In the Six-Day War of June 1967 aka the Third Arab-Israeli War, Israel defeated the United Arab Republic (Egypt’s name at the time), Jordan and Syria and managed, among others, to take control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, until then under Jordanian control.
In 1980, the Knesset passed the Jerusalem Law proclamation, which declared the entire territory of Jerusalem, a “complete and united” Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Nevertheless, foreign embassies remained in Tel Aviv. In Resolution 478 of August 1980, the UN Security Council made clear that the annexation of East Jerusalem by Israel was a violation of international law. The resolution was passed with 14 votes to none, with the US abstaining. The UN Security Council did not recognize Israel’s unilateral act. The annexation is illegal. Since 1980, the decision not to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital has been reconfirmed several times.
In 1988, the PLO published its Declaration of Independence, which designated Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. The city was still under Israeli control and Israel still claimed it as its capital.
Trump’s unilateral decision to recognize Jerusalem is Israel’s capital and to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem does not change Jerusalem’s status under international law. We are talking about a binding UN resolution.
It is true that the 1995 Jerusalem Embassy Act passed by the United States Congress (93 vs. 5 votes in the Senate; 374 vs. 37 in the House) demanded the relocation of the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem by May 31, 1999. The Jerusalem Embassy Act also called for Jerusalem to remain an undivided city and to be recognized as Israel’s capital.
However, this law, violating international law, remained unimplemented by all subsequent presidents, including President Trump, who signed a 6 months waver in June 2017. However, on December 6, 2017 he made his campaign promise come true and decided to implement the Jerusalem Embassy Act.
Despite protests throughout the Muslim world and by the international community, massive violence has not broken out yet. Most Muslim leaders asked for peaceful protests. The Turkish President Erdogan pushed for the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at an extraordinary Istanbul meeting on December 13, 2017 to make Jerusalem aka al-Quds the capital of Palestine and to move all Muslim state embassies there. This move violates international law as does Trump’s uninformed division, which makes the United States no longer a credible mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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Official portrait of President Donald J. Trump, Friday, October 6, 2017. (Official White House photo by Shealah Craighead).
